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Monday, December 19, 2011

A Nice Little Sail South

The idea is to go from Alicante, Spain to Cape Town, South Africa on a sail boat as fast as possible. Not having their own database companies and billions in disposable income, most people instead flock to a game to simulate the long race. I'm always intrigued by visualizations of a massive number of data points.
Of course those databases companies make both the real race possible and amazing geographic visualizations to go with it, such as the one below.

The track of each person that participated is shown in white, with a tiny blue dot showing the position of each boat.
Perhaps the coolest part is noticing things like the people who didn't follow through and sail straight into North America, or those who tried to use the Suez canal and sail around the horn of Africa rather than the western coast.

Whatever their reasons, its cool to look at the thoughts and strategies of so many people in just 30 short seconds!